Jack Chipchase was Rory Fitzpatrick before Rory Fitzpatrick was cool. Chipchase was the ultimate grunt of minor pro hockey.

When I was an impressionable boy, I saw a documentary about the life of Jack Chipchase, career minor league hockey player. It was a tale full of pathos, as I recall.

In the end, Chipchase only played four games in the semi-bigs, four games with the Philadelphia Blazers of the old World Hockey Association in 1972-73. That team also featured WHA aces of the ice palace Danny Lawson and Andre Lacroix.

Chipchase, the record shows, really wasn’t a very good player at all. Even with the NHL expanding all over, and the WHA forming, he was unable to stick in the big leagues or the semi-bigs of the WHA.

But now, it seems, Jack Chipchase has been called up to play for the Oilers.

I mean, his spirit lives on in the body of career minor leaguer Allan Rourke, who is getting another chance in the NHL after seven years in pro hockey, pretty much all of it spent in the AHL.

Rourke’s career stats indicate that he has only played 42 NHL games. How many will he play in Edmonton?

Maybe he’ll catch a real break and somehow last a few years. Sometimes that happens to the Chipchase-type. They get really lucky. Remember Scott Ferguson?

Ferguson was a super successful version of Chipchase. He was a determined player with as little talent as anyone in the NHL when he played for the Oil 2000-04. Not much of a skater, passer, shooter or fighter. But he managed to play 218 more NHL games than anyone else reading this post.

Ferguson is now playing in the DEL, which I have now been told is the German Elite League, and even there he looks to be the seventh defenceman on the team.

That kind of mediocrity and determination is so incredibly Chipchasian, there should be some kind of award for Scott Ferguson this year.

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